and
instinct are likewise heritable. Some instincts are originated
artificially. The reason why, on the very first opportunity, a young
pointer has been known to point at game, and a young sheep-dog to run
round, instead of at, a flock of sheep, is that some of their respective
ancestors had been carefully trained so to point and to wheel. These,
however, are exceptions to the general rule. Most instincts are of what
every one would call natural, and Mr. Darwin calls 'spontaneous' origin,
he explaining the meaning of the latter term to be that the slight
variations from a primordial type, the accumulation of which is
considered by him to constitute actual instinct, are 'variations
produced by the same unknown causes as those which produce slight
deviations of bodily structure.' But here I am once more compelled to
join issue with him. Of the causes which he styles unknown, I maintain
that we know at least thus much--either they are themselves intelligent
forces, or they are forces acting under intelligent direction; and in
support of this proposition I need not perhaps do more than show from
Mr. Darwin's example what infinitely harder things must be accepted by
those who decline to accept this.

Mr. Darwin, like every really truth-loving controversialist, far from
desiring to shroud, invites special attention to any seeming weaknesses
in his position; and, therefore, when contending that all the faculties
commonly classed as instincts, are exclusively due to natural selection,
of course takes care to particularise the cellmaking faculty of the hive
bee. And here, again, I gladly bear my humble testimony to the partial
success he has achieved. Although bound to protest against the claim set
up by him, on behalf of natural selection, to the entire credit of
producing the hive bee's most remarkable characteristic, I cannot but
think he has succeeded in removing all the apparent difficulties of
believing that natural selection's share may have been not less
important in that than in any other productive operation in which it
takes part.

In popular estimation the hive bee is a heaven-born mathematician which,
having been set the problem how to fill a given space with waxen cells
with the least loss of room and expenditure of material, arrives by
intuition and instantaneously at a solution which Newton himself was
ignorant of, and to which, but for his discovery of the fluxional
calculus, it would have been impossible for